I'm Your Man (37 page)

Harvey Kubernik, who had been given the job of food runner—Spector or Marty Machat, who would come by the studio with his girlfriend Avril, would dispatch him to Canter's deli to bring back chopped liver and corned beef sandwiches—had witnessed Spector in the studio before. Compared with other albums, he recalls, Spector's sessions with Leonard were “not too chaotic.” But for Leonard, says David Kessel, “it was a bit of a whirlwind.”

It was late on the second night of recording when Bob Dylan showed up at the studio. “He comes in through the back door,” says David Kessel, “and he's got each arm around a different woman. In his right hand, around the woman, he's got a bottle of whiskey and he's drinking the whiskey straight.” Allen Ginsberg followed close behind with his lover, the poet Peter Orlovsky. Seeing them, Spector jumped up and hailed them over the monitor. There were so many Jews in the room they could have a bar mitzvah, he joked. Work stopped while Spector came down to socialize. There was much hugging and drinking, then, as happened to anyone who came into Spector's studio, the visitors were put to work.

Leonard was recording “Don't Go Home with Your Hard-On,” a boisterous commentary on domestic bliss. Dylan, who was in the process of being divorced by his wife, Sara, seemed to have no problem entering into the spirit of the song. Ginsberg said later that “Spector was in a total tizzy, ordering everybody around, including Dylan: ‘Get over there! Stay off the microphone!' ”
5
Dan Kessel remembers, “He was very animated. He was behind the console, then with us in the studio, back and forth, interacting with everyone and conducting us.” Says Blaine, “It was like he was conducting the philharmonic, and it went on for hours. But that's the way we worked with Phil; he wasn't trying to run us into the ground, he was looking for that feeling. That magic.”

The session had turned into a boozy party. By daylight, when most of the revelers had gone, Spector and Leonard listened to the tape through the big studio speakers, the volume up, the music ferocious. “This,” said Spector, sipping at his Manischewitz, “is
punk rock,
motherfucker!” Leonard poured himself a glass of Cuervo Gold. “Everybody will now know,” said Leonard, “that inside this serene, Buddha-like exterior beats an adolescent heart.”
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At Dan Kessel's suggestion, the next session was moved to Whitney Studios in Glendale. A new building in a more sedate neighborhood, with all new, state-of-the-art equipment, it was owned by the Church of Latter-Day Saints; Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart had recorded there. “One night,” says Dan Kessel, “Phil was monitoring at supersonic levels—Leonard had to put his hands up over his ears—and suddenly one of the two huge playback speakers completely blew out, rattling the three-paned soundproof glass window separating the studio room from the control booth. The roar of the Wall of Sound at high volume can do that.” While the speaker was being fixed, the recording moved again, this time to Devonshire Sound Studio in the San Fernando Valley.

Leonard could not say precisely when he lost control of the album, but he knew that he had. “It definitely wasn't hippie or mellow, but Leonard was very together, very dignified and professional,” says David Kessel. “Then it got a little freaky for him.” The “entire enterprise,” as Leonard described it, was as “an ordeal.” Spector, as painstaking at getting the instruments and sound right as Leonard was with his endless rewriting, would often make him wait until two, three, even four in the morning to sing, at which point Leonard was exhausted and his nerves were shot. “It was just one of those periods where my chops were impaired and I wasn't in the right kind of condition to resist Phil's very strong influence on the record and eventual takeover of the record,” Leonard said.
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In the early hours of morning, after watching Spector's car drive away, taking the tapes of the day's recording to his mansion, Leonard drove back to his rented house in a foreign city, to a family on the verge of breaking up.

“I'd lost control of my family, of my work and my life, and it was a very, very dark period,” Leonard said. “I was flipped out at the time and [Spector] certainly was flipped out.” Where Leonard's darkness manifested as “withdrawal and melancholy,” with Spector it was “megalomania and insanity, and the kind of devotion to armaments that was really intolerable. People were armed to the teeth, all his friends, his bodyguards, and everybody was drunk or intoxicated on other items, so you were slipping over bullets, and you were biting into revolvers in your hamburger. There were guns everywhere. Phil was beyond control.” During one session, at four o'clock in the morning, as Leonard was finally getting to sing, Spector came down from the control room. In his left hand was a half-empty bottle of Manischewitz and in his right hand a gun. Spector wrapped an arm around Leonard's shoulder in a comradely manner. Then he pushed the nuzzle of the gun into Leonard's neck. “Leonard, I love you,” he said, cocking the trigger. “I hope you do, Phil,” Leonard replied.
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“Bullets all over the floor is an exaggeration,” David Kessel says, and in all likelihood that is true; the more media interviews a person does, the more an incident gets polished and hyperbolized. “There weren't bullets on the studio floor,” Kessel continues. “He's probably talking about Phil's house. By the way, there are a lot of Americans who have firearms for whatever purpose, and the Constitution says you can have that.” Dan Kessel says, “Leonard seemed intrigued with the whole Spector milieu and often made witty comments and observations about us, but I never got the feeling he was uneasy about the guns or anything else. On the contrary, in his own low-key way, he seemed to enjoy himself during the production.”

Stan Ross, the assistant engineer and co-owner of Gold Star, took an opposite view. “My main memory of that whole episode was that Phil and Leonard were both very unhappy with what was coming off and I think rightly so.”
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Devra Robitaille, Spector's assistant and, until recently, girlfriend, who played synthesizer on the album, agreed with Ross. She told Spector biographer Mick Brown that Leonard and Spector “didn't see eye to eye at all. There were a lot of creative differences. It was always very tense, very uncomfortable.” And unpredictable. Spector “could be in a great mood or he could be a raving lunatic. A lot of it was the drinking. Someone would say something, or he'd just get in a mood and stalk off. Everybody would be hanging around and then tempers would start to build and it's five o'clock in the morning and everyone's exhausted. . . . There were a couple of times when he would pass out drunk and Larry [Levine] and I would have to haul him back into his chair and revive him, and sometimes he'd somehow rally and that would be the brilliant take, the moment of genius.”
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Even Levine, Spector's longtime engineer and friend, had to say that Phil was “not at his best” and Leonard “deserved better than he got.”
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The fiddle player who had a gun pulled on him during the recording was Bobby Bruce. It was late, and he was doing a solo on “Fingerprints,” a countrified song about a man in love losing his identity, and Spector, Dan Kessel remembers, “wanted Bobby to do it again with a certain feeling. ‘Do it this way, Bobby. No, more like that.' ” The atmosphere in the studio was tense and, in an attempt to lighten it, Bobby started affecting an effeminate manner: “Why of course, Phillip, I'm just mayonnaise in your hands,” says Don Kessel. “Ordinarily Phil might have laughed but he wasn't in a lighthearted mood.” Spector pulled out his gun. Levine stepped in to try to calm things down, but Spector refused to put away the gun. The engineer had to threaten to turn off the equipment and go home if he did not. “He finally realized I was serious and put the gun away,” said Levine. “I loved Phil. I knew that wasn't the real Phil.”
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Bruce quietly shut his fiddle in its case and quit.

For the recording of the album's title track at Whitney Studios, Leonard brought along his own protection: Roshi. Dan Kessel remembers, “Leonard's Zen master was nice and friendly and spoke quietly. He was wearing proper monk's garb.” Says Ronee Blakley, “He was the kind of man you wanted to be around, funny, kind and disciplined—special. Leonard was also serving as Roshi's driver. It was—I hope I'm not saying this wrong—a lesson in humility. He was learning to serve.” Leonard had tried to persuade Ronee to go to Mount Baldy and sit with Roshi. “He told me,” she says, “that it had saved his life.”

The session started as usual at seven thirty
P.M
. but by three thirty
A.M
. they had still not played “Death of a Ladies' Man” all the way through; Spector had the musicians play no more than six bars at a time. At four
A.M
., Spector stood at the window of the control room and clapped his hands, and Leonard began singing his nine-minute meditation on love, marriage, emasculation and the emptiness left behind when “
the great affair is over.
” The enormous studio room had a cathedral pipe organ in it, which Spector told Dan Kessel to play. Kessel had never played one before. “I turned on the power switch, sat down and quickly experimented with the stops till I got the hugest sound I could find.” Then Spector “began leading us like a symphony orchestra conductor and Leonard came in at the perfect moment and started singing his heart out, while forty musicians came in together with sensitive attention to every breath of Leonard's vocal. Miraculously, without a chart and with no rehearsal, we all managed to glide in together for a smooth landing. We were all exhilarated when we wrapped,” says Dan Kessel, “and no one more so than Leonard.”

Four months after the last Whitney session in February, during which “Fingerprints” and “I Guess It's Time” were recorded, there was one session in June, back in Gold Star, for “Paper-Thin Hotel.” The song, with the familiar Leonard Cohen themes of separation, cuckolding and surrender, had been given a bittersweet, romantic arrangement with choirs, pianos and pedal steel. And that was it. Spector took home the tapes under armed guard, as he always did, and went to work mixing them in a secret location.

No one appeared to have told Leonard that the album was finished. He believed that the exhausted parts he sang in the early hours of the morning were rough vocals that he would have the chance to redo. They were not. When Leonard listened to the playback of the finished album, he flinched. What he heard coming out of the large speakers was a spent man, a punch-drunk singer, lost in the tracks. “I thought he had taken the guts out of the record and I sent him a telegram to that effect,” Leonard said.
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He asked Spector if they might go back into the studio so that he could sing his parts again, but Spector demurred. “In the final moment,” Leonard said, “Phil couldn't resist annihilating me. I don't think he can tolerate any other shadows in his darkness.”
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Leonard told the
New York Times
that he liked nothing about the album. “The music in some places is very powerful but, by and large, I think it's too loud, too aggressive. The arrangements got in my way. I wasn't able to convey the meaning of the songs”
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—songs that feature some of Leonard's most powerful lyrics about desperate, suffocating, true, faithless, tender, but more often murderous, love. Yet, however he felt about
Death of a Ladies' Man,
it would be hard to deny that Spector had captured Leonard's own sense of annihilation during that period of his life. Leonard
was
lost and spent, and there
was
nothing left. Suzanne had left him. Leonard's mother was in the process of leaving too.

Masha was in the late stages of leukemia. Leonard had been flying back and forth to Montreal, jet-lagged and heavyhearted. While all this was going on, he was also making the final edits to a new book, titled
Death of a Lady's Man
. Marty Machat, meanwhile, had recruited his son Steven, just out of law school, to persuade Warner Bros. to release the record. Mo Ostin, the head of the label, wanted nothing to do with it. Neither, for that matter, did Leonard's label, Columbia.

“That record,” says Steven Machat, “was two drunks being no different than any other boys, making an album about picking up girls and getting laid. It was the most honest album Leonard Cohen has ever made.” Steven Machat succeeded in winning over a Warner Bros. product manager, and from there he “got the deal done for [his] father.” He made it clear that he did not do it for Leonard, for whom he has no great affection, although there may have been some satisfaction in knowing that Leonard “didn't want the album to see daylight.” In his book
Gods, Gangsters and Honor
Steven Machat wrote that Leonard told him, “This album is junk. It's your father's masturbation. I love Marty, he's my brother. But I never want to see that man Spector again. He is the worst human being I have ever met.”

“At home Phil was delightful—except for the air-conditioning and the fact that he wouldn't let you leave. When it was just the two of us it was a very agreeable time. You know Phil, he has something endearing about him; it's impossible not to be fond of him. It was only when there was a large audience that a kind of performance that he's famous for would arise.”

What changed when you went in the studio?

“He got into a kind of Wagnerian mood. There were lots of guns in the studio and lots of liquor. It was a somewhat dangerous atmosphere. There were a lot of guns around. He liked guns. I liked guns too but I generally don't carry one.”

Were the guns being fired?